On Friendship

Not bragging or anything, but I have a handful of really close really great friends. I’m not sure how it happened, really. Some stuck around from high school, dwindling down from the large crowd of kids that packed the hallway by the band room every weekday morning before the bell rang for class. Some I met in college — yes, I guess I actually did meet people in college — and somehow I became friends with them during the long semesters and years full of Shakespeare and Psychology and Procrastination with a capital p. Some I met after school, somehow or another, fellow roamers around town, or they were involved in the crazy post-graduation stuff I found myself doing.

And I guess it’s really just amazing. Because I’ve met a lot of people — hundreds and thousands of people — and this little bundle of people I keep close to me, well, how did that happen?

I think about friendship a lot. I think about relationships a lot, and the different kinds there are or can be, and the kinds that exist but shouldn’t.

I think friendship is underrated: the fact that one human, with all of their crankiness, and weird or offensive jokes, and psychological problems, or their introverted or extroverted personality, or their awkwardness, or their favorite music — all of that and more combined — can meet another human, with all of their stuff, and be friends. Like each other. Really, truly, like each other. Like the differences and sameness. Get along. Laugh. Cry. Talk about life or other stuff or bad television shows or cool shoes or good peanut butter froyo or what it feels like to be lonely.

Friendship is one big beautiful example that the world is bigger than you are. That you aren’t really alone up there stuck in your own head because there are other actual people out there in their heads, and you can talk to them and be people together. It’s really weird. Very strange. Very great.